the rehearsal

I knew that this was the story I'd tell at our impossible wedding. That my favorite movie was playing, and you watched it, smiling, and I watched you, equally and irrationally gleeful. That "forever" popped into my head, and I didn't swat it away. That, for the first time, I was content with the idea of love the way that everyone else talked about it. That it seemed so enduring.

And of course I wouldn't address how less than an hour later, I was rolling my eyes and shaking my head and trying to separate the futile from the hopeful. I would not speak of how fresh faces pervaded my vision like pennies gorging a wishing well, how the hypotheticals glistened in the sunlight.

And i'd never speak of how some sideways comment from a roadside bomber made me doubt the sincerity of everything. How I questioned my capacity to love and if it was my job to stop until i knew every connotation and consequence.

No, instead, I'd put on my finest virgin white and my coyest smile and take faith in some new beginning. I would shed the scales from other fingers and burn each tawdry bit of fiction; i would stop substituting in random personalities for variables, and i would love with every fervent good intention.

Because sometimes self-deception is the only way to discover the selfless truth:

love has no definition
love has only its reality

the night the tide stayed in

... and well, you start to question the relevance of your existence when you can invest the whole week hoping for a simple fucking text message (from anyone)to remind you that it's okay to be still sometimes.

and when it doesn't come (and it doesn't), you start to see the pimply bareass truth of things.

at first you said, "i'm growing into life"
then you thought, "na, i'm growing out of it"
and now you see it's growing out of you.

all the confidence you once had in your place in that reality erodes and you are left a ? in an imperative sentence.

i should have taken the change of pace when i had the chance. i should have lapped up liminality while it laid out, lascivious before me.

because now i see the people turning away as their path floods with better prospects
and there's nowhere left for me to stand
on the bridge we thought we built
to that there in the distance.

because for all the limelight i've stolen
i never had the presence
for you to look at me

and for all the metaphors i mix
you never understood that
i was anything

a martry for your science

as you tell ghost stories
i become fiction.

you speak life into worn names
and i find myself transcendental
(i am
the notion of molecules
the taste of water
the embryonic recall
the color of night)

without blink or breath or bleed i believe in that existence
and you, likewise, take faith
(in some overwrought theory)
(in some underread text)
that permits such conviction in absence,
such obsession with the blurred

strange how we should worship the absurdities that haunt us
but earnestly neglect the evident

flesh

with the fidelity of a heretic
embraced by blazing stake
still fuming about orbits and
waves of light

allow me to illusrate the irony of my blog name

i do not pray.
i have not prayed in some time.
but maybe, i'm ready to repent.
hands folded
in a requiem
for all the things that consume you.

cause folks, it's time to let go.
of people who exist.
of people who do not.
of habits we can kick.
of curses we can not.

"let us bow and pray"
let our heads fall to our feet
our every everything prostrate
and demons of our egos and vices
will become banshees of the room
until the heart of error ceases
to beat.

but this is NOT the time for an exorcism.
this is not the time to merely evict and goodbye
kill the night's fixation and neurosis
let no breath of beguilement remain
that we can live.

that we can remember.

that you can be.

the revelation

why has it taken me so long to accept that you're an asshole?